Towards Our Last Yesod Class

[Joey]

Hi Everybody,

Thanks for welcoming Tzvi Fischer to our class last week. I thought
it was an interesting conversation. He came away feeling very good
about the group, and I know that there will be follow-up. There were
a few questions we didn't handle from the first Quandaries class that
I intend to speak about next week, and I would like to entertain
questions that must have arisen from our guest's approach to faith,
the role of Torah, and the centrality of what I'll call his theology.
Often I get asked the amusing question, "Well, that's enthralling,
Rabbi Joey, about the way you interpret Judaism - but what would an
Orthodox teacher say about all of that?" Well, it's time to turn the
question on its head! All of that was fascinating last week, but how
much of it truthfully should apply to my own view of today's
universe? It's that latter frame of reference that I would like to
apply to the final Quandaries class. How much of this traditional
lens makes sense, given a postmodern way of thinking about the world
that prevails for all of us? Stay tuned, and thanks for the memories!

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Joey


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[F. Davis Woods-Morse]

I hope that you will address what was, for me, the pivotal moment of the night when you offered up the H. Kushner view of a limited divinity as an explanation for the existence of evil. As you know from our private meetings, Harold causes me to double over in pain. And, for folks who think this is sophistry, I offer this. If we are all divine, including the earth and the planets and the viruses and the weapons of war, then we can hope to be whole people individually and in our collective soulness. If some of our bodies are evil and non-G-d, the duality is insurmountable. We will never achieve that august day when Haitians have building standards like Chileans and Chileans like San Franciscans. The gay frum teen will hate some aspect of self and Elohim will be, as ever, a plural feminine noun governing a masculine singular verb rather than the inheritance of all Adam's progeny.

Gut Shabbos everyone. I hope you all dance with Elijah and the Queen this very night.

Davis

[Rob Tanner]

Hi Davis,

I wouldn't say Harold Kushner causes me to double over in pain, but that's only because I don't personally believe his ideas about a limited divinity are worth even that much effort.  So, other than how we respond, I guess we're generally in agreement on that issue.  What interests me most in what you said about if we are all divine, including the earth and the planets, etc. I am curious to how you mean that.  

One of the authors I've read recently, Jay Michaelson, has what he considers a radical approach to non-dualism (non-dual Judaism)  in his book Everything Is God.  I like most all of what he has to say but where I come to disagreement is in some of the nuts and bolts about consciousness and self as illusions, just a phenomena that we take to be really real.  We, and everything, can be divine and that divinity can be one, but that doesn't mean that out of that divinity can grow individual personality and consciousness that is real and that our individual consciousness can be individually real even though your consciousness and mine are rooted in and not separate from the divine and do not and could not exist outside of the divine.  Also, what is true at one level of understanding, may not be so at another (the famous layers of the onion?), and I think he fails to see that or at least to make that clear.

So any, I am curious where you are coming from.

B'shalom
Rob